Tumblr Claims To Make It Into 10 Most-Trafficked U.S. Websites

Popular social network and micro-blogging platform Tumblr has officially entered the top 10 most-trafficked networks in the United States, the New York City-based startup proclaimed Monday in a post on the company blog.

“You guys have earned an audience bigger than the biggest TV networks, and you continue to make some of the most thought-provoking, insightful, inspiring, funny, diverse and compelling content being created today,” Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp said in the statement.

The announcement cited data from Quantcast, linking to a page on the web analytics company’s site tracking Tumblr’s user number. The page claims that Tumblr now has 202,637,856 monthly visits in the U.S. and 616,776,768 worldwide. The reach in terms of people accessing the site per month, meanwhile, is 60,803,592 in the U.S. and 168,243,984 worldwide -- bringing Quantcast’s measure slightly below the 170-million mark that Karp claimed in his announcement.

The Quantcast report stated that Tumblr’s U.S. and worldwide traffic alike increased 10 percent in November from the previous month.

Tumblr’s exact position, however, remains somewhat more ambiguous than Karp’s initial claim let on. As TechCrunch reported, the Tumblr mistook its “top 10” badge to mean that it was ranked as one of Quantcast’s 10 most-trafficked sites. Quantcast actually listed Tumblr as number 15 in its monthly list of “top sites.” The ninth-most ranking came instead from Tumblr’s other classification as a “network.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean that Tumblr was being inaccurate or dishonest in its original statement, however. As Quantcast explained to TechCrunch, the “network” ranking includes traffic to any blog supported by Tumblr. The fifteenth most-trafficked ranking, meanwhile, only counts people that visit the main Tumblr webpage. Since one of Tumblr’s characteristics is the ability it grants users to create custom URLs while still remaining within the network, the “network” ranking might be a better metric by which to judge the company’s growth and performance.

Tumblr now supports more than 80 million user blogs, according to its own estimates. In October, the company ranked 40th in comScore’s monthly list of the “top 50 U.S. Web Properties.”

The new ranking would put Tumblr in an elite group of marquee Internet properties such as fellow micro-blogging startup Twitter (ranked fifth), Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) (ranked third), and, of course, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), which still commands the number one spot on Quantcast’s list with 194.4 million monthly visitors in the U.S. alone.